Roaming costs are price gouging, the associated costs of providing roaming are nowhere near.

Example: less than a year ago I was charged ~40€ for viewing two wikipedia pages, one of them happening to contain a short video. My bad sure since I forgot to disable roaming, but this is obviously outrageous pricing, so I really don't buy the subsidising point of the naysayers.

However, now EU regulates the price to consumers to be lower than the wholesale price of roaming charges between operators. That is a failure. They should regulate the wholesale price.

In practice: I pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data. If I go to Italy and use my subscription there, I still pay 20 € per month for unlimited mobile data, but my operator has to pay 7 € per gigabyte to the Italian roaming partner.

Because there are more people traveling from north EU to south EU than vice versa, and competition of mobile operators works much better in northern EU, this is practically a monetary transfer to support the economies of southern Europe. And then there's the possibility that an Italian person acquires a SIM from my operator, because local Italian ones don't sell subscriptions with unlimited mobile data...

My operator has to counter this by a price hike and/or disabling of roaming.

Where do you have the €7/GB from? It's the cap, not the price usually paid. I remember a study by the EC where they found out that most operators don't pay significant amount of roaming costs. It either evens out or the amounts are too small.

Most countries will have 3-4 operators so that there is competition and I doubt that €7/GB is the cheapest an Italian operator can offer to a wholesale client.

It doesn't work like this. Your EU guaranteed roaming mobile data package is limited to 2*monthly bill/wholesale-price-per-GB. So in your case that looks like 40/7.7 which is about 5GB. Anything beyond that your telco CAN charge you (but doesn't have to) by usage. I am not sure what that charge can be, but it is per KB spent and is calculate from wholesale price per GB.

You should check if your unlimited plan applies to roaming. I have a unlimited data plan in Croatia, but in roaming it's limited to 10 GB.

EU was planning to explicitly regulate against such caps. If you provide unlimited data in your local operator's network, having caps when roaming would be in breach of this regulation.

Has that changed?

Yes, the rule is based on how much you pay for your unlimited plan compared to wholesale regulated rates.

(tho they plan to lower the regulated rates over time)

The unregulated gouging of northern European holidaymakers before this roaming regulation was probably a far bigger monetary transfer than the regulated costs.

There is still a cost. And that cost is going to be passed on to everyone whether you use it or not.

The abolishing of roaming charges also applies between operators. As the true technical cost for roaming is negligible there is really no passing of charges from those who use it to those who don't.

Is this a recent change? I hadn't heard of such.

So, e.g. Telia doesn't have to pay any roaming charge to WIND Hellas if a Telia customer from Sweden goes to Greece and connects that network?

Previously I heard a cap of 7 € per gigabyte for data fees was regulated.

Charge still is regulated to 7.7EUR per GB, but that is not its cost. Cost is indeed negligible as data is mostly transferred on exactly the same networks as the rest of Internet traffic in EU and nobody sane argues that you should pay 7 EUR for each GB you transfer.

If I divide my monthly internet bill with the amount of data I transfer during it, then price of GB of data transfer is indeed close to nothing.

To add to that: I can buy wholesale bandwidth within Europe with some ease for <$2 per TB transferred. If you look at quotes for undifferentiated transit from pure bandwidth providers it will be higher, as they typically price based on global routing, but when you know your breakdown is heavily tilted within a region, you can get massive discounts by e.g. limiting 95% or whatever of your capacity between European networks where the provider will exchange most of the traffic via peering - of course the big carriers do their own peering and own their own networks and effectively pay event less.

But even the most price-gouging "captive audience" transit providers (e.g. in data centres without multiple choices of carriers) rarely charge more than ~$10/Mbps (depending on utilisation down to ~$40 per TB transferred or about 0.04 cents per GB...)

Then have the roaming charge regulated to 7€ per terabyte, instead of 7€ per gigabyte as now.

Maybe eventually, but the point is they had to start somewhere, and 7 per GB is still a substantial reduction.

The EU parliament wanted to go much further, starting at 4 and gradually reducing to 1. They'll get pushed further down eventually, but at the same time nobody wants to overdo this and cause problems for these providers by going too fast.

My point is that they should regulate the extractive pricing between operators before they regulate the pricing operators have to give to end customers.

Now those operators that have been competitive will suffer. Those that have been extractive towards their own customers and their competitors will benefit.

That's below the price you pay for data transfer from a server at AWS.. I agree that €7/GB is probably too high, but will still be higher than for internet via cable.

AWS is a notoriously bad example as they're one of the most expensive places you can get bandwidth. I have projects where my entire infrastructure costs less than what the bandwidth charges alone would cost me at AWS...

It is a cost to my operator, and it is a cost the the EU has explicitly approved.

It would be if it was one way only. In practice users from all telcos roam on other networks, negating large bits of this exchange. Real price per user is much lower.

The roaming is far from symmetric.

I'm not sure that there is a cost in aggregate – what is the money being spent on?

there is no cost incurred, it was always just an excuse to charge more. living in northern ireland, if i cross the border into the republic of ireland, i would be charged roaming fees for being slightly more southern on a tiny island

Ignoring the argument on whether having everyone subsidising the few for some things is good or bad, does it even apply here?

Does "roaming" really cost anywhere near what they charge for it? Or does it only cost that because they could all charge each other that in hopes to make out with a little on top?

No, these days, in most cases, it costs them very little, and often nothing. If you're on a Vodafone or Telefonica network, then the network you're roaming on is probably also owned by Vodafone or Telefonica. Even where you have to roam on an unrelated network, the price difference has never made any sense.

Roaming costs what it costs to transport the (voice) data over the internet, because all of the telcos naturally now use that as their backbone and have been for 10+ years.

So it costs absolutely nothing.

Simply not true. Europe has true competition on telephone contracts, roaming fees were just a milking cow for all telcos to extract some additional income they now have to survive without.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted. This is currently happening in my country. All operators are revamping their subscriptions.

The costs are negligible.

But since they can no longer gouge roaming visitors, they will have to cover that lost income which means raised prices.

Wrong. If tourist movement is spread out across Europe equally, then mostly nobody will need to subsidize anything, since the mobile operators will be paying each other. Of course, cost per GB is different in some regions, but interestingly most popular tourist places are on the Mediterranean where data plans cost less.

> If tourist movement is spread out across Europe equally

It's not.

I know. Some operators will benefit slightly, some will not. And every tourist is satisfied. This is what I would call a good policy.

Also there are protection plans in the policy for the extremely unlikely scenario that a company is not making a net profit.

It's not "slightly". There's a considerable imbalance.

Source?

Wikipedia, in the tourism article, links to WTO:

http://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/9789284418145

Million tourist visits per million population:

  Finland: 2.7/5.5 = 0.49
  Sweden: 10.5/9.9 = 1.06

  Spain: 68.2/46.5 = 1.47
  Greece: 23.6/10.8 = 2.19

(I quoted above Italy, which does not have that high visitor/pop ratio, but you get the idea.)

And about current competitiveness of operators, World Bank data at http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/where-are-cheapest-and-m...

Percentage of income going to operate a mobile phone:

  Finland: 0.34
  Sweden: 0.38 

  Spain: 1.52
  Greece: 0.49

And this with typically restrictive data quotas in southern Europe, and no data caps in the north.

I.e. the new EU regulation punishes competitive markets severely. But yes, it might help the economy of southern EU countries by making it attractive for them to acquire operators from north, get rid of competition and start the same level of extraction they do on their own population.

Not necessary true! There is a huge disparity between the cost of these services to the companies and the price for the users. This means that there is still space for regulation.

Thats not true in many cases. The wholesale price cap is 7.70€ /GB. This is the price telcos have to pay other telcos for their users roaming. And this is more expensive than end-user price in the nordics/baltic region.

And now the providers have strong incentives to look for the cheapest roaming options, or if necessary band together to overcome predatory pricing. There is no reason for these wholesale prices to be that high and they will continue to be forced lower. The EU Parliament pushed for it to be 4 Euro, declining to 1 Euro over a few years, for example.

I would say there's space for competition, but the EU chose to not regulate to help competition, they chose to regulate to help incumbent South European operators, which are cash cows for well-connected partners.

Didn't notice any price changes in Croatia. I pay ~15 EUR for unlimited calls, SMS, and mobile data (it's limited to 10 GB in roaming).

You mean that like any government policy it looks at what will be best for the majority of people rather than the minority? Shocking.

that's alright, they'll just legislate to prevent price rises too

Competition between providers will fix that one soon enough.